Sean Sullivan

Biography

My writing is so much like the things I craft from reclaimed wood - begun with passion and purpose, sorely short on planning.

The three legs of wordcraft being preparation, inspiration and perspiration, I never fail to make do balancing and wobbling on just the latter two.

I just can't resist the urge to plunge my hands right into things, start shaping parts of the whole and fitting them together.

I grant mine are stories made from old wood - scraps and bits that have seen the world, overused and weathered, salvaged and repurposed.

Yet somehow in spite of all that, I find my mode of word and woodcraft work well. For when I’ve hidden all the mistakes I can find, sanded out the rough parts and those apt to leave splinters, I hold something that has character, feels comfortable and fits in.

"Is it an antique? Authentic?” some might ask."Or a reproduction perhaps?” A bit of both, I'd have to say. I hope you enjoy reading!

I spy you there without your shoes / Shy mere months the terrible twos / This is I think, that precious age / Your tottering and prolific phase / When little legs in / rapturous rage / Are one rambling, run-on phrase / Pitter pattering across the page

In a warm night’s sky when but a child / When thoughts and hours away I whiled / I saw a thing hung there on high / That flashed within my widened eye / Four stars against the sky arrayed / My mind transfixed by what they made

In a foreign land, a girl on her own / The language and landscape wholly unknown / Perhaps looking for love is the reason she came / Or it’s happenstance, acquaintance by chance / Either way may she find the upshot the same / A life-changing kiss and whirlwind romance

Easier by far to smile and agree / To fabricate and nod / Than declare oneself sovereign and free / From a manufactured god / But it’s stood the test of man and time / The pinnacle of reason, rhyme / The greater height - the harder climb

Gazing skyward, sense and substance to find / A man's fate with star signs is sadly entwined / Odd chamber of echoes that vacuum of space / Swallows his cries of injustice with nary a trace / So much too of the hope and blame we misplace /

Through it all the old house never let Mildred down, kept her warm and safe from the world outside. Now she and the house are feeling their age, and Mildred sees the end coming for them both. She wants more than anything to leave something behind for her granddaughter, and on this cold winter night Mildred has a plan, one she hopes will make everything right and mean a new life for them both.